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Kopano Groupware – an open source productivity suite

Group Dynamics

Article from ADMIN 60/2020

By Andrej Radonic

Kopano Groupware seeks to be more than a slot-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. We reveal how you can commission the platform and the highlights it offers.

In many corporations and institutions, groupware solutions based on Linux serve as productivity tools to free users from Microsoft vendor tie-in for email, calendars, and other functions, as well as save licensing costs on a large scale. Although proprietary solutions such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype for Business, Webex, and Zoom have claimed major slices of the market for themselves, the open source camp is still lagging behind in the groupware sector.

Despite a long tradition, with former giants Scalix, Zimbra, and Horde, only a few open source solutions still survive at the enterprise level, even as real-time collaboration becomes more important with a rise in the number of home offices. German-Dutch software manufacturer Kopano [1] is now looking to fill this gap with its open source software of the same name.

In this article, I describe the installation of all components on a Ubuntu server. For a small setup with up to 25 users, the Kopano team recommends a server with at least two CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 5GB of disk space. Depending on the number of active users, the RAM requirement can increase to 16GB.

In Real Time

Kopano relies on the software stack from Zarafa, which became extremely popular thanks to, among other things, its MAPI and ActiveSync emulation named Z-Push. The ambitious feature list (Table 1) reveals that Kopano wants to be far more than its ancestor: In addition to email, group calendar, address book, tasks, notes, and document processing, real-time communication is now also on the agenda.

Table 1

Kopano Features